


She's Leaving Home (After Living Alone For So Many Years)

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Family Secrets, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Post-Episode: s04e04 9-1-1 What's Your Grievance?, Protectiveness, Reflection, Self-Doubt, i just think maddie deserves an opportunity to properly reflect and grieve and find peace :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29385402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: And she carried it, dutiful daughter, all those years. Alone and unforgiven. But there will be more to her life than this ache.
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley & Maddie Buckley, Maddie Buckley/Howie "Chimney" Han
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32
Collections: 9-1-1 Tales





	She's Leaving Home (After Living Alone For So Many Years)

**Author's Note:**

> title from the beatles' she's leaving home

Three thousand, add two hundred, tack on a bit of change. It’s a decent down payment on the kind of used car that coughs but doesn’t cap itself at two hundred thousand miles.

Spun as thirty-two hundred it’s something else. It takes that many seconds (almost) to eat away fifty-three minutes from the hour. Thirty-two hundred hours will (nearly) call to mind one hundred and thirty-three days. And three thousand, two hundred, eighty-seven days (approximately) stitches together the folds of nine years. Three-two-zero-zero beat out on a touchpad comes with seven hundred and twenty unique possible letter arrangements, but none so precise as E and B followed by the hollow silence of the unhooked operator. That’s the long and the short of it, up to a point.

Maddie has spent every _inch_ of her life holding the minutes in the hope it’d be enough to beat the clock. It’s something that lives right behind her, shadow-switched. Because before the usual ceremony of being a teenager counting down to the unexpired freedom of being out from under her parents’ roof, before bunching the months together like tickets spat from the skee-ball machine to redeem herself from twelve to uncharted thirteen, before she pressed her tiny fingers to her mother’s swollen stomach and wiled away the days until her baby brother, she gave her time to trying to be the kid that made it to the next day.

She didn’t know—couldn’t have possibly known—just how much of her life would be spent in the pursuit of making it from sun up to sun down. How, if she just kept counting, that was enough. There have been days when she didn’t want it, when the magnitude of all that was and is and could-be-maybe-some-day raked itself across her, but she’s never faltered in keeping track.

Even that comes at a cost. Counting puts itself in hand with waiting, which is something she rarely does. It’s too much standing still, too much asking for. Waiting counts on the mercy and the judgement and the whims of others. There’s trust in it, and Maddie has been fresh out of that long enough for whole lifetimes to have come and gone. She’s working on that, slow as it is.

For what it’s worth, the last time Maddie waited gave her one of the best things of her life. Doogie Howser was hanging up his stethoscope and Agents Mulder and Scully were the new kids on the block (and the other New Kids were going by NKOTB full-time.) She kept track with her Strawberry Shortcake calendar and the red marker she found in the kitchen junk drawer: six months and one day’s worth of slashes. She would have gone for the whole nine, but her parents hadn’t told her about the baby until need outweighed—always ‘the baby’ until he was simply ‘Evan.’

At the time, they had thrown around words like _fragile_ and _promise_ , but Maddie knows now—and had an inkling then—those had less to do with her and all the more with her parents’ own hauntings. She was nine. The concept she was breakable hadn’t crossed her mind yet, even if she knew her family was.

Evan came home from the hospital the day after he was born. She had her back pressed against the wall outside the kitchen, listening to Grandma Buckley’s perfunctory clip as the itinerary came from Phillip, lodged in a phone booth outside the hospital. Maddie circled the days on her calendar with the last bit of solution in her marker, a two day celebration of this wonderful thing, and went to wait in the den.

Their father— _their_ , again, not just _her_ —came in the door first, a bundle of hospital-equipped blue unceremonious in the crook of his arm. She caught sight of a striped cap and a striped bootie, and she never realized how odd it was to be grateful for that. Confirmation they came home with anything at all.

He wouldn’t crouch down for her to see him—this baby she had waited for, that she had prayed just like she was supposed to in repentant kneel at her bedside every single night for six months and one day. Instead, when she raised her hands in that first joy, he mistook her meaning and settled the lump of blankets in her arms while their mother disappeared somewhere to the back of the house for a week.

Under the weight of responsibility, Maddie eased herself down onto the rug in front of the couch, her spine lodged against the hard metal frame that was rib-cracked underneath perfect yellow fabric. She propped him up against her bent knees just so she could look at him. Eyes mashed shut, a constant yawning from big cheeks and a fat, pink tongue—he was exactly as he was supposed to in every respect but the one their parents wanted. He was Evan—just Evan. A harsh syllable followed by a finite one, as if to say this is the only one there ever was. But that didn’t matter to Maddie. If their dad hadn’t come back to retrieve the baby for his feeding, she would have sat there all night. All her love, all her hope pinned on him.

From the beginning, Maddie saw Evan _._ She didn’t look for the pieces of Danny that might have found their way to him, nor did she want to. Evan was her brother, which was a tumultuous term at best, but it was real and right. Brothers were there one day and not the next, brothers weren’t there and then they were cradled in your arms. Difference being, this time Maddie had the head start, thirty-two hundred more sunrises. And she knew from that second she’d do for Evan everything Danny had done for her, right up until the end.

Then came the day when she was older than Danny ever got to be and she realized it would take more than that, because there were some things he never got to teach her.

From the vantage point she has now at something graciously close to middle age (which is new, she never did get to be the middle of anything) she doesn’t remember the exact shape of Danny’s smile, or the bumps of his laugh. She only knows the jut of his nose from the pictures she sees once every heartbreak, and her memories are yellow-worn and creased at the edges. And yet, as inexplicable as it is, he remains untouched in her mind. Missing poster on the milk carton pale and baseball diamond blond hair.

Sometimes, when she used to close her eyes on a life she wanted to believe wasn’t hers for just a while, she’d be able to see the gap in his teeth that never got a chance to fill. Remember their shrieking wonder of tying string to his lateral incisor and her hand slamming the bathroom door shut. Sometimes, through a soaked haze, she’d hear him counting with her. But then, the Buckley kids—never more than a pair—had been old neighborhood hide-and-go-seek champs years running.

The thing is, where the pain grew with her, and they learned their respective places, it never got any easier to not talk about Danny. His birthday on the calendar made her want to light a candle—green, or yellow, never red. Seeing boys grow into men on the street that could be him, with their partners and their children and their unburdened smiles, never stopped taking her breath away, but she couldn’t point out the fact. And though she’d never put a voice to it, there have been times—so many times it’s shameful—that she’s thought maybe if Danny had been there he’d have been able to do right by Buck in a way she never seemed to be able to. Not that she didn’t try—because she tried so _hard_ —but she felt like she could never find the best way, or even an acceptable one. And where was she supposed to learn? Parents that stopped being just that the day Danny didn’t come home? The ones who left her to the nightmares that would wake her in the middle of the night screaming, because she had ‘to learn’ but they never could put the lesson into words?

The day she left home she thought it was what she deserved, for being their child. That leaving, disappointing Buck, running out of time, those were an _of course_. The distant Christmas cards from the boy turned man she stopped knowing one day were just the admittedly creative inescapability of her life, divine retribution for the fact that as much as Buck wasn’t Danny, neither was she, and who the hell was she to try?

She also thought, with the last of her hope for a while, that maybe it would give Buck a fighting chance. That maybe without her there he could get even a little of what he needed. Underneath her hurt and her anger and her sadness that came in great swells, she knew it wouldn’t work, but she had to believe it so the rest of her could survive. She’d already scattered too much of herself, and she knew that. Because there would always be some part of her still waiting for Danny to come home. Stalled out on her bubblegum ten-speed on the front lawn of a house that rises like a spire in her static memories. Picture perfect like a newspaper obit. She had to keep what was left for herself.

The hall light clips on behind her, lighting her back and the ceaseless space around her. It fills in the unearthly shapes of the living room—the throw pillows dumped unceremoniously on the floor and the breathing presence of the arm chair. She gasps on her breath, the back of her hand going to her mouth to keep it there. The waning skin, pulled tight over eczema splotched knuckles, warms with the wet of her tears. She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting out in the dark, but it’s been long enough she knows the name of it would make Chimney’s mouth pinch with worry.

 _Maddie_ , he says behind her, tired but calm. It’s not a question because the answer is already so plain in the horrible tightness that binds her shoulders to the knots in the base of her neck and the crumple of tissues on the coffee table.

Danny’s picture is locked safely in the box on the kitchen table, but it’s like her body pulls toward it, the way she lists to her left, and that’s the side Chimney comes up on. He wedges himself without announcement into the crook of the couch so the line of his body holds hers up. His arm goes around her, and he presses a knowing kiss to the crown of her head.

Her reaction is instant in the way she tries to smear the tears off her face, the lie— _I’m sorry, I’m just hormonal—_ crawling from a mouth trying to pitch itself into a good-natured smile. But she sags against him instead of pulling away, and when he offers her his hand, she squeezes it as hard as the pain needs her to.

When she told him about _Daniel, he died—_ because _Danny, my brother_ , was too much to begin with—the guilt retched inside her until it almost spilled over. But the relief of speaking any version of his name for the first time in twenty-some years was so sure, so unignorably there, it made her light-headed.

Chimney had taken it in an upright, almost modest way. Hands white-knuckling the countertop and eyebrows jotting up his forehead for only as long as it took her to get all the words out. Then he passed a low, whistling breath and wrapped her in a careful-for-the-bump hug that fed without ever thinking to devour.

She hadn’t cried then because she was too busy fielding the false but all-bearing thought that it was so selfish, so like her, to unload this onto someone else. Wouldn’t cry when she told Buck because it was his turn to loosen and come apart. Thirty years of silence before even that, it didn’t leave much time for her to cry at all. But back in the kitchen telling Chimney, he’d whispered _I’m sorry they asked you to keep that_ and it cut her self-punishment off at the knee, because it spoke to the worst part of it all. Not that she was made to do it, not that she was punished even for upholding it, but that she was ever put in the position in the first place. She knew it was wrong, to ask a child to keep that secret, but it was a truth hard-admitted. Having someone else see that without her needing to ask was invaluable.

With Chimney beside her now, her breaths start to even out. He takes the length of his shirtsleeve between his fingers and the meat of his palm and uses the broad side of his hand to work the excess tears off the side of her face that isn’t against his shoulder. A hair’s breadth thin, repetitive stroke from temple to cheek to chin with the sort of tenderness that comes from concentration. She loves it—the way that carefulness doesn’t cross his mind, but easiness does. There’s nothing reserved in the way he loves her. It’s so vast that sometimes she hums with the potential of every second, and it’s so stable she stops counting when they’re in the same room. It’s so much that it’s enough.

She wants to be able to say that it’s years behind her, the version of herself that could believe she doesn’t deserve this kind of love, but she knows she’s not that far behind. She still has residence on some shore at not so uncertain lengths. Yet even dogging this old threshold, Maddie doesn’t feel the need to look for her.

Protection is a kind of word that stings. It’s fashioned like a nosy neighbor and cast into the misguided-but-well-meaning great aunt. Sometimes, it goes too far, and sometimes, it asks too much.

Maddie never had a choice. Down, even, to which side of it she’d be on. Without Danny, she was thrust into learning. Where the bandages were for scraped knees, how to clip her tongue so she wouldn’t accidentally set off her parents’ hurt and bring down a week’s long quiet. Those were rapid months, dizzying with the deluge, and then came Buck. Buck who she has never, not for a single day, regretted protecting. Buck who she would do it all over again for, every back-handed second in her parents’ house, if it meant she got to have him, just as he is, every time.

For so long he was the single worth of her life. _My brother, Buck._ And he’s never stopped being that, but now that she has herself, Chimney, her daughter to come, and not a drop or a trickle but a wash of people she cares for and who care for her, Buck remains the first. The touchstone on which she bases the good parts of her life because he’s never been anything but, and he’s always welcomed her home, even when home for her was disarrayed and not much more than where her feet could carry her.

But that’s the thing. She came back, he let her come back to _him_ , and he didn’t ask for anything more than they both knew she could give—not backlogged answers, not commitment. All he wanted was his sister, and she was that as best she could be, always up until a point. For Maddie, brother has always been a double-edged word, it’s no more certain than it is fleeting. But for Buck, sister doesn’t carry that same fear. When she left, it was across county and state lines, but to Maddie, a brother leaving is something far more devastating.

The threat of Danny’s road still hangs over her head, as much as she tries to turn her face away from it. But the veil thins when she’s sitting in hospital waiting rooms, and in the last few years she’s been in more of those than she’ll ever care to. The first time comes back to her in her worst moments, and has been steady on her mind since her conversation with Buck. The joy of having him back in her life skidding into the hell of antiseptic smell compounded by the fact of having to do it alone. Her parents would never make the trip, weren’t the kind of people to hold her hand across the uncomfortable chairs if they did, and the person she would normally call to keep her company was lying on the operating table. Between the parking lot and the lobby doors, it was the first time in all her years she lost her closest held truth of if she called, Buck would answer. With inane facts and childhood jokes, but he would be out there somewhere, undeniable with life.

That untouchable fear of thinking she’d already lost him slips into the corresponding image of first coming around the corner and seeing a patchwork of tense care. Creased brows and pinched mouths and palpable impatience waiting on an update from the doctor. A drove of people who cared about the kid brother she’d been trying to be everything at once for all her life. It’s that memory that keeps her upright when the news bulletins scroll with disaster and her line fills up with people’s unmitigated distress. And it’s that that reminds her that no matter how hard she tries, she will never be able to protect him from everything. Not from fires and tsunamis, not from people’s own agendas, not even from her. Because as much as she fought to distance herself from their parents, in this, she’s still ended up on a side that’s not entirely Buck’s.

And that’s the backend bite of protection. It’s what she’s been struggling to reconcile since she told him about Danny. Protection keeps people from getting hurt until it erodes and collapses in on itself, doing all the more damage.

It tricks you into believing you’re keeping him from unnecessary pain until you’re looking into his eyes, full of a kind of hurt you’ve never seen, and you think for all the miles that have ever been between you, you’ve never felt as far away from him as you do in that moment.

The urgent press of Chimney next to her, thigh to thigh and the sureness of breathing, is the only thing that offers her enough sense to realize some fracture of her grief has renewed itself. The last flood gate finally broken through, rushed with this undeterred admission to herself. It’s what woke her up out of heavy, fitful sleep, this thing that finally tipped her over the edge even though she’d held on through every bit of earth that had been turned over. She cries for every wrong turn, every come-to-pass fear, every forced choice. And though each sob pounds the inside of her chest, she knows the ache will fade.

Chimney ducks so he can see her face fully, wiping away the filth above her lip without even a grimace. She all but folds over his arm, a hand caught in the crook of his elbow to keep her steady. And when her tears start to taper, he catches the end of the string and coaxes _deep breath in, there you go._

Unfathomably, the seriousness with which he says it makes her laugh. Slow at first, and still half a cry, but it builds in honesty when she’s able to pick her head up, eyes crinkled at the corners. _Are you this friendly with all your patients?_ she asks and he grins, thumb tracing her cheek, saying something about only the ones he’s having a kid with.

Her first apology had been knee-jerk unstoppable, but half-hearted anyway, so she doesn’t do it again. Still, she wants to say something, and it comes out _I didn’t mean to wake you up._ She knows he wouldn’t care, would have held her in his arms and let her cry herself unburdened without a second thought. She knows she would have let him. But she needed to take a moment for herself, to let it all sink in and begin working its way through. It had hit harder than even she thought it would, but for all the rawness, she feels less restless than she has in a long time.

Chimney shakes his head, promising _you didn’t. I just missed you guys._

It would sound odd to anyone else she thinks, but she knows exactly what he means. There are some days when she can’t stand the patience, when the mile-wide longing fills her up entirely. She wakes in the night and watches the up-down of his chest as he sleeps. The baby will shift and she’ll put her hand overtop what she thinks must be hand or head. It’s like standing outside and watching rain come across the landscape. You can feel the way the air changes, you can smell the rich shift, you _know_ it’s coming and you want for the first breathtaking cold patter, but it’s not quite there yet.

If she could, Maddie would go toward it, but there are still months to go and she wouldn’t trade them for a thing, so she’ll wait for her baby girl as long as she takes. She’ll mark off the days in red and blue and green ink on the calendar in the kitchen. She’ll circle the day they bring her home from the hospital with the same care as the day she came into the world, and she’ll make sure to tell her about it every year, even once she’s old enough to complain about the routine of it. Whatever it takes so she knows there’s no competition, no one else she has to be.

Maddie will take the picture of Danny out of her baby box, fish out the one she keeps behind her driver’s license, and put them on the wall. For the first time in a long time, he’ll be there. Not like he has been—an absence of an absence of an old wound. He deserved more than that, and as much as he’s Maddie’s grief, he’s not her secret, not anymore.

The uncle her baby will know from the day she’s born will cry the first time he holds her in his careful arms, fearful of breaking her. Maddie will cry too, but she’ll know without a shadow of a doubt that behind herself and Chimney, there’s not a single place safer any child of hers could be. Because Buck is _good_ , and he’s never let her down, no matter what he thinks. He didn’t always have the luxury of every good option, but he still fought to remain kind and that has never left him.

This life won’t be a perfect one, but Maddie has never wanted perfect. She’ll get to have love, and family, and it will all run a course that goes farther than just the line from her to Buck and back. It’ll be a life she can breathe in. A just one. It will be _hers._

Leaned side to side, her head on his shoulder, Chimney starts to nod off with his cheek pressed into her hair and his hand still held in hers. She rubs along the soft skin of his forearm and wakes him, gentle as possible. His eyes are blurry, but he waits for her silent cue.

She follows him down the hall, her hands on his shoulders, each of them a guide. When they pass the switch, she flips the light off and doesn’t turn back to see the way the living room darkens. Chimney helps her into bed first with a leveraging routine they’ve worked out since he came home, and she holds the covers up for him to slide under when he rounds the corner balling his messed shirt up in his hands.

When the sheets settle, there’s a solid quiet. Not even his interrupted breathing from the dry way he snorts in his sleep when he’s bone tired. _Maddie,_ he says. Her eyes flick up and over the lump of her pillow. His are closed, and she almost thinks she hadn’t heard anything at all until she adjusts to the dark and finds there’s a purpose to the way his brows are tilted.

 _He’s going to figure it out. You both are,_ he explains, mouth half-full of pillow.

And she knows that, for once she honestly does. She knows that she’s just the messenger and Buck’s hurt, his anger, his _shame_ , it’s not for her, and even if it were, she doesn’t have to carry it anymore. Maddie has known Buck since the day she first held him in her arms, and she thinks he’s known her just as long. They’re done with coming in and out of one another’s lives, but there’s going to be a storm on the water to weather before they’re in this together again.

He’ll carry himself in quiet until he breaks, and she hates that she can’t stop it. Wants more than anything to curb the pain for him, but she’ll always want that, and he can survive this without her intervening. This man he has become, this good man, kind man, selfless man, _survives_ this. Not alone, but because he isn’t. She’s been pushing her own needs back for a litany of others, but this overwhelming proof that he will be _okay_ without her killing herself to keep him safe, it’s finally enough.

She’ll always be his big sister, will always be a shoulder for him, that’ll never go away. And there will always be a cut of her heart that’s connected to his, a part of her that won’t hesitate to put herself between him and hell. But she can’t continue to sacrifice her everything to do that. It doesn’t do right by her and what she’s broken down and rebuilt, or by him and all the striving he’s done to become someone he can be proud of. There isn’t anyone left that matters that will hold that against them.

He’s teetered off into sleep again, but Maddie covers Chimney’s hand with hers anyway. It doesn’t feel like the open mouth of a hospital waiting room, doesn’t feel like standing at the edge of the three thousandth, second hundredth day. It’s neither punishment nor reward. Just what she deserves, finally.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @cauldronoflove !!


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